isr.co.ro : glossary BITNET An academic network developed in the 1980s that's slowly being absorbed into the Internet after several mergers and name changes. At its height, BITNET connected more than 200 schools and universities using a store-and-forward system, rather than the real-time exchange of packets used for the Internet. Ostensibly, the name stood for Because It's Time NETwork, a reference to the view of the founders that their academic departments deserved a network comparable to the CSNET consortium that linked computer science departments.